The bear in the back yard: Myth,ideology, and victimage ritual in soviet funerals

A longitudinal myth analysis of American news magazine reports on the USSR reveals a pattern of image‐clusters that endures from the time of Stalin's funeral to Brezhnev's, almost 30 years later. A Russophobic worldview is explored through a symbolic vocabulary in which clusters of images cohere into a few dominant, generative myths. It is argued that the resultant rhetorical vision, which chains out across three major news magazines over a 30 year period, functions as victimage ritual. Through this rhetorical form, a society that repeatedly espouses peace can cathartically be relieved of the guilt it might otherwise feel as it drifts into another Cold War. It is dramatistically purified by imagining an enemy that is coercive, irrational, visceral, cunning, animalistic, thus simplifying the complexities of culpability. What remains to be studied is how recurrent myths are perpetuated over long periods of time, and how the ideologies they fashion produce an effect on individual consciousness.